The Surprising Patents of Steve Jobs

Depending on who you speak to, Steve Jobs was a prolific innovator, relentless collaborator, or shameless limelight stealer. Regardless, his name is on more than 350 patents. The patents always list Jobs as part of a team. But given his famous attention to even the tiniest details, I’m guessing his name wasn’t added for purely ceremonial reasons.

Included in those 350-plus patent filings are some very well known products and features, including iPhone, Apple II, and original Mac. But beyond the iPhones, iPods, and iMacs, Jobs had a hand in some less obvious patents that illustrate Apple’s thought process and continue to shape the way the company presents itself to the world.

Architecture

The glass staircases in flagship Apple Stores boast some unique engineering. The steps are constructed of three layers of glass with a DuPont interlayer. Titanium connectors hold the glass in place, and the opaque steps are laser etched for traction (and to keep pervs from looking up skirts).

What are glass stairs without glass walls? And a glass roof? This protruding glass structure in this concept would be part of the main store, much more ambitious in scope than the glass cube at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York.

Like the Apple store in New York, the Shanghai store is below ground. But instead of just reinventing the cube, Jobs and the Apple team decided that curved glass was the way to go.

To achieve the effect, they added glass spines to the interior of the circular column to attach the curved panels. The glass drum stands over 42 feet tall and features one of Apple’s famous glass staircases.

Illustration: USPTO

The Odd iPods

Given the numerous iterations of the iPod that we’ve seen over the years, it’s no surprise that Jobs and his team pursued all sorts of twists on the music player as they looked beyond the click wheel. None of the iPods shown here ever made it to an Apple Store, but they offer a glimpse of the CEO’s willingness to try new ideas on a proven product.

The problem with design patents is that they reveal only the design of a product, not how it works. But from the look of this 2008 iPod deisgn filing, Apple was experimenting with using a trackpad on an iPod.

It’s not too far-fetched. The iPod clickwheel moved from a mechanical wheel to a circular touch-sensitive surface beginning with the second-generation iPod. But a trackpad that small seems, well, not so appealing.

The funny thing about the iPod design patent involving a cross as a means to navigate the menus is that this is the design most used by knock-off iPods. Maybe Jobs and Apple realized that the only way to stop the flow of counterfeit iPods was to patent their favorite design.

This patent just perplexes me. I’m sure Jobs and his designers had a really good idea for how the slider interfaced with the iPod’s UI. Maybe tap the center to play a song and tap the top and bottom of the slider to go forward and back. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a red herring to mess with other companies. Remember the Apple slate rumors? Apple was supposedly building a device called the Slate, and suddenly other companies have devices called the Slate.

Before the iPhone, Apple was toying with the idea of using a clickwheel to navigate a keyboard and number pad. Just spin the wheel to a letter and tap the center to input that letter. A novel approach, but not exactly elegant. Fortunately, the touchscreen prevailed and the iPhone got a giant screen that Google totally didn’t use a template for Android.

Illustration: USPTO

The UI

Apple hardware might be pretty, but without the underlying UI that makes things “just work,” you’re stuck with a really pretty piece of metal and glass. Apple famously gave Xerox a ton of stock options to use the GUI interface that ended up on the first Mac. After that, Apple was on its own to make the look and feel of its products easy to use.

Steve was running Next when he patented the Dock that’s become the go-to UI feature of OS X. When Apple purchased the company and its technology to bring over to the Mac, the Dock leapt from the incredibly expensive Next Box to Macs.

The “Dock” in the patent is on the right side of the screen instead of the bottom, as is the default case in the current OS. But the way it works is basically the same now as it was when Jobs filed the patent in 1991.

For an example of Steve Jobs' legendary penchant for micromanaging, take a look at the packaging for Apple products. The iPhone unboxing experience hasn’t changed significantly over the years. You remove the top of the box, and there’s the iPhone. Underneath the plastic that cradles it are all the additional pieces — the cables, decals, and guide. The device itself is the lid to a secondary box of additional content.